Why should Customer Experience and Customer Success work together?

CX (Customer Experience) and CS (Customer Success) are two distinct but equally important departments within a company. However, they often work at cross purposes because of the lack of communication. Although CX and CS are similar, their objectives are extremely distinct, as are their respective activities, and outcomes. To understand the sole purpose of bringing these two teams together, let’s first examine the distinctions between Customer Success (CS) and Customer Experience (CX).

The objective of Customer Experience (CX)

Customer Experience (CX) describes how a customer feels about your product and brand overall. CX is supposed to keep a watch and work throughout the customer lifecycle – from the buyers’ journey to the after-sale customer journey. CX is a comprehensive concept that goes beyond product-only, sales-only, or service-only approaches. Anytime a customer interacts with the business—through people, products, or brands, it is all tracked and mapped to understand their experience. Client satisfaction score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Acquisition Rate, and Conversion Rate are currently used to gauge these.

86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

The objective of Customer Success (CS)

Customer Success is a key revenue driver for your business. CS owns the after-sales funnel. When you run into issues with your users and customers, it can cost your company revenue, credibility, and customer trust. But if you have a solid Customer Success process in place and adopt the right tools, you can expand your business swiftly and sustainably. Customer Success is supposed to focus on customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, and customer retention. Furthermore, a CS team creates opportunities for revenue expansion within the customer base by assuring that customers are getting tangible positive outcomes with the products and services they have purchased.

The performance of CS is evaluated mainly based on onboarding, success planning, product adoption, health monitoring, retention, and then customer expansion.

Both CX & CS work in silos because of their different roles and the different lines of business they serve. While CX is more closely aligned with marketing or service to get more customers in the pipeline and CS is more aligned with Sales to retain more customers – both functions operate while keeping the customers at the center.

Why should CX & CS work hand in hand?

To build a more holistic customer-centric organization, it’s ideal for CS & CX team to work hand in hand. In the current subscription economy, the expectation of a customer is very high when it comes to experience & service. Both these play a crucial role to keep a customer engaged with a brand/product/company.

From a business outcome point, the key common KPIs for both are:

1. Boost customer retention
2. Improve customer satisfaction, and
3. Improve cross-selling and upselling

Here’s how customer journey improves when CX & CS work together

• Similar experiences throughout customers’ lifecycle (before-sales and after-sales). So, CS needs to be upraised with the information by CX directly or Sales.
• For any relationship, the first milestone is the most important – successful onboarding. Your current onboarding process can be improved with valuable CX insights
• CS can share a comprehensive customer view with CX (since the CS has a complete 360-degree view of the customer). This can help CX improve the experience. Here is an overview of a comprehensive customer view.
  

This is how CS should ideally look at customer data if they are not looking right now. With this, CS can involve CX wherever they find it necessary.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the goal for both departments is to create more loyal customers. Satisfied customers return frequently, remain loyal to the brand, and consequently convert to brand advocates. To enable this, a company should always put their customer first. And to achieve this objective, the first step should be to integrate customer information throughout all customer-facing teams. To begin with, the first 2 departments can be Customer Success and Customer Experience.